In many different areas, businesses implement certain types of automated processes. In doing so, the time and expense for manually handling a given process can be avoided. While many different types of processes can exist in different business environments, some common types of automated processing environments include processes for monitoring responses or events occurring in computers or other similar types of systems, business processes for handling various operations within a business, and customer processes, particularly with regard to handling processes related to initialization, configuration and control of customer computer equipment.
While automating any of these and other processes is a goal, the automation can be difficult, given that there can be many different operations that are to be performed, and these may be specialized depending on a given environment. Accordingly, current process automation systems are inherently limited by the wide variety of processes that can be implemented, by the many different types of operators, and so forth.
One area in which automated processes can occur is a computer network such as a network of interconnected server computers, such as the commonly known server farm. Typically in such a server farm, certain processes with regard to monitoring, fault management and so forth can be automated. This is particularly so, as generally in a server farm, all of the existing servers are of a single entity, and thus requirements or desires of the entity are uniform across the various servers.
However, in other computer network environments, a single entity situation may not be present. That is, other types of computer networks can be of a multi-tenant environment, in which various servers or portions thereof are associated with a given customer. This type of situation can be present in a hosting environment, such as a web host, storage host or a similar such hosted environment. In addition, with the growing importance of cloud computing in which computing capabilities and application execution can be separated from a user, the multi-tenant environment can provide many challenges in attempting to automate processes.